


Does a bride forget her wedding ornaments?

by BeautifulLife



Series: Kings and Queens [1]
Category: The Selection Series - Kiera Cass
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Gen, Prequel, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 14:03:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16620404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulLife/pseuds/BeautifulLife
Summary: There's no bouquet for Katherine Illéa to manage, not after someone tipped the wedding planner that she might conceal a weapon in it and stab her unwanted fiancé.  Katherine is mostly sorry she hadn’t thought of that idea before it became impossible.





	Does a bride forget her wedding ornaments?

_Undaunted by post-war shortages, the designers of Miss Katherine Illéa’s wedding dress used parachute silk—twenty-five yards of it, to achieve the full skirt and twenty-foot train! More than 40,000 seed beads went into the embroidery, which forms a pattern of stars and orange blossoms. Constructed in just seven weeks by forty seamstresses working around the clock—_

Katherine Illéa can feel the weight of every single bead. It ought to amount to a little over a pound—she calculated this one night, trying to sleep—but it feels like enough ballast to hold her to the ground, ruining her fantasy that the strong but thin fabric will somehow allow her to fly.

She’s standing in front of a tall gilt mirror in the green parlor of Illéa House, watching herself be turned into a bride while the gossip press chatters to cameras in the corridor. The dress is cut breathlessly tight to mold her body—soft and fleshy, but boyishly curveless from shoulder to hip—into the illusion of a narrow waist and jutting breasts.

Nobody has worn a white wedding gown since Father was a boy.

Ever since her engagement was announced, it’s been a source of mild surprise that the public coos and gasps and obsesses over every detail. How do they know to do it? How do they have any idea what to expect?

Cam Newin brushes fine powder over the foundation she’s painted on Katherine’s face. It wasn’t really a shock to find that her personal maid had been a spy for the resistance, using her mistress’ social engagements to infiltrate the homes of wealthy collaborators with the Chinese occupation.

She’s eighty-nine percent sure that Cam directly killed one of her best friends, but it’s not a thing she can say—not to Cam, not to Father, certainly not to Mama, and absolutely positively not to Spencer.

Even more than Mama believes it, her middle brother has always believed Father is a hero.

“Hold your mouth still and don’t squint,” Cam orders. She’s drawing Katherine a new face: less pudginess around the chin, stronger jaw line, narrower nose, wider eyes, more symmetrical lips.

 _This isn’t me,_ Katherine thinks at the woman in the mirror. Katherine Illéa would never agree to marry a stranger more than twice her age. Katherine Illéa might be forced by wealth into parties and tennis matches, but she was studying engineering. While Spencer is fascinated by the financial manipulations of Illéa Enterprises, Katherine’s goal is to eventually manage the technical side, the part that makes things.

Katherine Illéa might eventually have fallen in love and married—probably to someone like Uncle Brenton, who is smart and loyal and capable and just needed a _chance_ to show what he could achieve.

“There.” Cam steps back to admire her creation. “Bring the veil now.”

Grace Lowell—daughter of the famous Miriam Lowell, who of course is in charge of all the wedding arrangements because nobody approaches Miriam’s style—steps forward with a cloud of tulle. “You really look like a princess, Kathy.”

“Thank you.” Katherine swallows everything she’d rather say because Grace is a sixteen and naïve and cannot do one single damn thing to save her. The girl’s dark fingers are cool where they brush skin between stiff artificial curls, as she pins a hidden cap in place.

Cam helps in fluffing the tulle until it stands around Katherine’s head like angel’s wings, but it’s Grace who settles one single arc of veil between Katherine’s face and the world. It is so much, so _obviously_ like the wall of a cage that Katherine has to quash nervous giggles.

The wreath that Cam sets above the veil is, at Miriam Lowell’s insistence, a simple braid of orange blossoms. “Let the world see that the daughter of the richest man on the continent doesn’t think of herself as a princess,” she said at a meeting that Katherine endured only by dripping brandy from a concealed flask into her tea. In that interminable march from tiny sandwiches filled with fish paste to little iced cakes topped with candied violets, Katherine got herself so smashed that she fell asleep on a sofa and woke with a headache that distracted her for three days.

“Are you ready for your papa?” Grace asks.

“Yes,” Katherine lies.

She doesn’t turn for Gregory Illéa’s entrance into the green parlor because that would indicate affection or respect. Since he told her point-blank that he was selling her to Swendway and she’d learn to like it, every time she probes for either of those feelings, she finds a starless void.

So her father has to come up beside her, where she can see both of them together in the mirror. It is, as always, a surprise that he’s an inch shorter than she is—a little bantam of a man, with a shock of white hair and the implacable will that comes backed by wealth and power.

She can’t believe she ever sat on his lap.

“You’ve done good work,” he says to Cam.

“Turning a pig’s ear into a princess?” Katherine asks.

“Making you presentable to marry a prince. Most young women would be thrilled.”

“Yet in all these years, none of them has.”

He turns to little Grace Lowell. “Run and get those reporters to stop blocking the corridor.”

Even though this officially leaves him alone with Katherine—servants don’t count—he still lowers his voice. “For the rest of the time until the vows, you will be _silent_ , young lady. You will take your vows exactly as the book says. You will say _yes_ and _I do_ where you are supposed to say them. Do you understand?”

Katherine lets the pause stretch before she nods.

“Do you _understand_?”

She nods again.

“I want to hear you say _yes._ ”

“You just told me to remain silent. Which is it to be, Father?”

“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.” He holds out his arm, and she places her hand on it, exactly as she’s been taught.

The corridor outside the green parlor is a maelstrom of camera flashes and gossip reporters shouting questions. Katherine is not sorry to duck her head as if too shy to answer any of them.

_Are you excited?_

_Are you in love with the Crown Prince of Swendway?_

_Is there significance to the orange blossoms?_

_How do you feel in your wedding dress?_

She feels as if it’s pulling her down into some undertow she can’t see.

In the limousine on the way to Angeles Cathedral, Father lectures her on the proper way to represent Illéa Enterprises to the government of Swendway. Katherine lets the flow of words slide down her concealing veil, as if she’s standing behind a waterfall that she’s standing behind, dry and wary. She never cared about the financial and political side of the business.

The cathedral bells are ringing noon as the limo pulls up. There is no more time. Her skirt is insanely cumbersome in climbing the steps. Her train, her veil—here’s Grace Lowell to straighten them. The big doors open. Her hand is on Father’s arm again. A fanfare sounds. Her knees are water but she has to walk.

At the far end of the cathedral, four people wait for her. The priest, a skinny little man, is dignified in a white and gold stole that was dug out of a museum for the occasion. Under the scents of flowers and incense, the cathedral air has a tang of cleaning fluids, and the mismatched green velvet curtains behind him conceal damage where art was removed by the Chinese occupiers.

Katherine’s lone bridesmaid is a fifty-something cousin of the Crown Prince, chosen for her impeccable breeding and lack of spoken English. _A gesture of unity,_ Miriam Lowell called it, as if Katherine didn’t know that the important thing was to exclude friends her own age who might help her escape.

Spencer stands beside the groom, looking tall and dark and princely and _absolutely helpless to stop this farce._ What is the point of looking like a hero if you can’t fix anything?

And then, between Spencer and the Prince—her groom waits. Crown Prince Emil de Monpezat of Swendway is packed into the sleek lines of a white military uniform. His medals gleam bright. His hair—silvering blond, receding at the temples—gleams brighter, slick and oily. His crown—well, his crown is the point of this. It’s a gold circlet ringed with gem-encrusted spikes. _A fence around his brain,_ whispers a little voice in the back of Katherine’s head, but she’s not going to laugh. She will not have the gossip press saying she didn’t take her wedding seriously.

It’s too late to resist when Father puts her hand in the hand of the Crown Prince. The man looks at her with perfect well-bred blankness. Spencer is white around the lips. Mama, sitting in the front row of pews, cries gently into a lace-edged handkerchief. Shadow-like Damon, the youngest brother, whispers to cousin Brentwo, making him laugh.

“Who gives this woman in holy matrimony?” the priest asks.

“I do,” Father says. He means it.

The ceremony proceeds at tedious length. Katherine kneels, stands, kneels again, trusts the Duchess Hedwiga or whatever her name is to keep her train untangled. There’s no bouquet to manage, not after someone tipped Miriam Lowell to the idea that Katherine might conceal a weapon in it and stab her unwanted fiancé.

Katherine is mostly sorry she hadn’t thought of that idea before it became impossible.

She says _yes_ and _I do_ at the right spots, and so does the Crown Prince. He slips a plain gold band on her finger—her engagement ring’s been in Father’s custody this whole seven weeks, for fear of what she’d do with the cutting power of a diamond, and _that_ , Katherine _did_ think of for herself—and lifts her veil to kiss her mouth with cool, impersonal lips.

She is married.

Katherine kneels again. The Duchess Hedwiga lifts away the wreath of orange blossoms. There are more questions, this time about loyalty to the nation of Swendway. A crown settles onto her head. It fits, which surprises her. It carries the weight of a future headache, which doesn’t.

Her _husband_ raises her to her feet and turns her to face the crowd. Grace Lowell scuttles to turn her train.

She sees, as if for the first time, the cascades of flowers and ribbon decorating the cathedral. Miriam Lowell has done a beautiful job, as always.

Mama is smiling. Damon is hassling Brentwo. Father—

Father’s entire attention and being are focused on the crown she wears. If he were any more _intent,_ his eyes would glow.

That crown is why they are all here. He told her that, the night she cried and begged and pleaded for her freedom.

“It’s not that it automatically makes me royal, though we’re going to encourage the uneducated to believe that,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s that Swendway owes money to France and Italy, and your dowry’s going to take care of that nicely. In return, the European countries will back my claim when I make myself king. King Gregory I of Illéa has a fine sound, doesn’t it?”

“But we just fought a war to go back to being a democracy,” she said. “Uncle Brenton told me all about the United States—”

“Children’s tales. The United States of America is a lost dream. It burned itself out. Your uncle’s an idealist, and even he admits that _now,_ the country needs a strong central government. A king, in fact.”

“You’ve made a lie of everything.”

“There’s only one truth, and that truth is power. Grow up, daughter. I thought you had brains and ambition. I thought you might be the child who took after me.”

She wiped away enough tears to see the hard lines of her father’s face. “If you really thought that, you wouldn’t be selling me.”

Today, in Angeles Cathedral, the face she wears is not her own, and she is no longer Katherine Illéa.

Katherine, Princess of Swendway, nods to the man she will never again call _father_ and walks beside her new husband out of the cathedral to face the cheering crowds. When the gossip reporters chatter about how _romantic_ it is, she smiles—gently, to not crack her make-up—and shows off her wedding ring.

Tomorrow, she will be in Swendway, in a court where she can neither understand nor be understood. She is no longer sure how that differs from how she’s lived her entire life.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is paraphrased from Jeremiah 2:32. Since Katherine's wedding takes place very soon after the end of the war, her dress is loosely based on Queen Elizabeth II's gown for her marriage to Philip Mountbatten in 1947, crossed with wartime stories of gowns sewn from parachute silk because no other cloth was available.
> 
> Omission of the "speak now or forever hold your peace" section of the wedding ceremony is deliberate -- religion was suppressed under the Chinese occupation, so there's no real standard that most adults remember, and Gregory Illéa got exactly what he wanted from this ceremony, in every way.
> 
> I'd started out to write wedding fluff for a number of not-covered-in-the-books royal weddings of Illéa, and Katherine wanted very badly to exist and to have a personality beyond a sobbing and uncooperative daughter. So here she is.


End file.
